Virtualization and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are being utilized in a number of technological settings. By way of illustration, an emerging trend is architecting large-scale, cloud-centric data centers based on SDN and virtualized resources. There are several issues with respect to such implementations, however. For example, providing access for virtualized machines executing on data centers to a remote physical device or resource connected in a wide area packet-switched network (e.g., the Internet) is fraught with difficulties relating to, among others, having to support several different protocols, multitude devices and management schemes, and cumbersome protocol parsing techniques.